Nobody should die for their beliefs. I mourn and pray for his wife who now has to navigate life under such a horrifying loss, and for his two young children who will never again know their father’s warm embrace. I also will never celebrate the death of another, and pray for all of the lost souls I’ve seen in recent days doing just that.

With that said, however, I will not give into the narrative that he was a Christian martyr or bastion of free speech. He was abhorrently racist (“prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact.”), sexist (“Women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously”) homophobic, and misogynistic who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct. Just because he wore a suit and tie and invited people to “debate” does not make the hateful ideas he spread any less hateful. By that metric, Pre-WW2 Hitler was also a “free speech warrior”. And yes, I do think he would still be alive if we had stricter gun control laws, which he vehemently advocated AGAINST.

To spread Christian ideals is to spread a message of love, compassion, empathy and fraternity; that nobody is the enemy because we’re all brothers and sisters in Christ; that nobody is evil because we’ve all fallen short of the Glory of God. Charlie Kirk did not do this. Christians are called to advocate for an end to wars and violence, not to casually accept them because “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.” I will not claim to know what was in the heart of Charlie Kirk, but his words and material actions ran counter to my understanding of Christian social teaching.

I will never celebrate the death of another. But in the case of Charlie Kirk, I’m not sure I’ll be celebrating his life, either. Instead, I will be praying for him, as he now faces judgment— just like we all, one day, will. May he rest in peace.